Contract, Adoption, and Sibling Incest: The Problem of Democratic Community in James Fenimore Cooper’s Wyandotté

This paper argues that Cooper’s novel Wyandotté adapts Locke’s conception of the social contract to create a mythic origin point for capitalist privatization, and then explores how the domestic plot of the novel embeds this bequest in highly conventional scenes of contracted kinship in the form of adoption and marriage. The novel privileges economic contract over political compact both in its political and domestic plotlines, with the latter using adoption and sibling relations to signify the insufficiency of philosophies of social contract, in line with the era’s turn from Lockean social contract theory to more economic philosophies of contract associated with Adam Smith. Drawing on Juliet Mitchell’s psychoanalytic theory of siblinghood, the paper identifies in Wyandotté’s rendering of the conventional nineteenth-century plot wherein quasi-sibling lovers reject adopted siblinghood in order to marry each other a challenge to democracy. This challenge differs from the one identified established historicist interpretations of incest in the nineteenth-century American novel in that Mitchell sees incest not as a sign of repressed, forbidden desires, but as a failure in developing sameness-in-difference essential to justice in social relations. Drawing on Mitchell’s theory thus avoids a symptomatic reading that locates in such quasi-sibling marriage s the fulfillment of a disguised political desire, focusing instead on the political possibilities suggested by the condition that is lost (adopted siblinghood) rather that which is won (marriage).